Archive: April, 2007

Well, for those of you who have been following the exciting progress, I posted my current reading lists for my research. It’s all very exciting and hopefully things will come together soon. I hope to use this space to post notes on readings, which may be helpful for not just myself but for anyone who is interested in this sort of thing. We shall see how things turn out.

Research Plan:
The general goal of this research is to investigate the simulation of social agents. The goal in this simulation is to create a sort of microworld inhabited by virtual characters whose behavior is in between the complexity of the Sims and Facade. From the perspective of artifacts, this is important because Facade’s complexity makes it difficult to author multiple characters and scenarios. The complexity of the Sims does not account for deeper social behavior, most all of the work is done on an interpretive level. Furthermore, a category of social simulations opens an entire potential genre of games that has been nearly untouched. This category could address themed social environments based on settings defined in existing literature, though social simulation is by no means limited to that. Many settings taken from literary context have strongly defined genre archetypes and these can be used to author schemas that define the structure of character behavior. By placing players in such an environment and giving them thematically relevant verbs for engaging with this world, it would be possible to create a revolutionary new genre of games.

Committee:
Celia Pearce
Ian Bogost
Janet Murray

Disclaimer:
This reading list is not yet organized and polished. It contains all of the sources I plan on using for this research, but the organization is loose, and the labelling is somewhat inconsistent. These discrepancies will be fixed over time, and you may investigate this page to keep up to date.